Oxygen is the ceiling.
What is lifting it worth?
Every constraint on a farm — density, feed rate, growth, survival — sits under the same one. This model sizes the oxygen plant off your feed rate, the way a farm actually works, then caps the aeration saving at what that plant really supplies. Put your own densities, conversion ratio and mortality in and watch the answer move. Every assumption is a slider, and every slider carries where its number came from — including the ones where the honest answer is "nowhere".
Your operation
Pick a system and the fields fill with typical numbers — then change every one to match your farm. A production unit is whatever you treat one at a time: a pond, a raceway, a tank. One injection skid serves one unit, so the units you treat set both the hardware and the share of the farm this analysis covers. Density at harvest is the number oxygen actually constrains, which is why this model asks for it rather than for tonnes per hectare.
The economics of a kilo
This is where the model stays honest. Every extra or recovered kilo below is credited at contribution margin — your farmgate price less the feed, seed and handling that kilo still costs — never at revenue. Feed alone is usually 40–60% of the price, so the conversion ratio and the feed price do more work here than anything else on the page. Premium share and the discount on the rest set the price gap that makes a count-size or grade shift worth modelling at all.
- Annual production
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- Crops
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- Blended price
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- Variable cost
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- Contribution margin
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- Feed spend / yr
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- Gross margin / yr
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Water, power & running costs
Share of peak oxygen demand supplied is the most consequential field on this page and the one worth playing with. Raise it and the plant covers more of the farm's oxygen budget, which unlocks a larger aeration saving — and buys a bigger, hungrier plant to do it. Lower it and the system becomes a cheap water-quality intervention that leaves the paddlewheels doing most of the lifting. There is a right answer for your farm, and it is somewhere on that slider rather than at either end.
Oxygen sizing & investment
The chain below is the physically real one on a farm: feed drives metabolism, metabolism drives oxygen demand, and oxygen demand sizes the plant. Peak feed is loaded at 1.8× the cycle average because feeding is concentrated in the last weeks of a grow-out — the plant has to survive that day, not the average day. Ponds carry sediment and plankton respiration on top of the animals; a RAS tank is almost all fish. Both cost boxes are editable, so a dealer's real number flows through every figure on the page.
- Units treated
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- Water treated
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- Side-stream flow
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- Per unit
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- Peak daily feed
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- Peak oxygen demand
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- Supplied by this system
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- Delivery rate
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- Injector systems
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- Oxygen plant
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- Connected load
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How are you paying for it?
Value levers
Eight ways oxygenation shows up in a farm P&L. Switch off anything that doesn't apply to your system — a flow-through raceway has little aeration to save, and a farm that buys in seed has a different loss profile from one that doesn't. The pale band inside each slider is the range the evidence actually covers; past it, you are past the evidence.
Conservative keeps only the four levers with published work behind them and drops carrying capacity, grade and cycle time entirely. It is the number that survives a lender, and it is where this page opens. Expected adds density and grade at modest settings. Cycle time is off in both, because nothing has ever measured it and an extra crop is far too large a claim to hand to a slider.
A note on the survival evidence. The often-quoted jump from 15% to 75% survival comes from deliberate infection challenges in a laboratory. It is real, it is peer-reviewed, and it is not a farm-season number. That is why this calculator asks what share of the losses you already take might come back, rather than asking you to believe a survival rate.
Where the money comes from
Sensitivity
Shrimp and finfish prices swing hard, feed prices swing with them, and a farm can lose a crop in a week. The useful question is not "what is the return" but "how wrong can this be before it stops working". Everything below re-solves live against the levers above.
Cumulative cash position
Your settings against the full conservative-to-optimistic envelope. If the band clears zero well before the line does, the case is robust; if the two barely differ, your assumptions aren't doing much work.
What moves the answer
Each live assumption swung across the evidence band marked on its slider, measured in net present value. Farmgate price and feed price are both in here, because on most farms they move together and a margin squeeze hits from both sides at once. Whatever sits at the top is what to pin down before you buy — the rest is noise.
Mortality recovered against farmgate price
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Take it with you
A one-page analysis you can print, save as PDF, or put in front of a buyer, a lender or a board — with the assumptions, the oxygen basis, the provenance of every figure and the pricing caveat attached.
Generate the report
The numbers on this page are already yours — no gate on those. This just puts them into a document and lets us follow up with a real quotation if you want one.
We use this to send the analysis and follow up once. See our privacy policy.Important information
The numbers above are a planning model. These are the terms on which they are offered — they apply to every figure on this page and to the report you generate from it.